


let me lead you from your solitude

by malicegeres



Category: Love Never Dies - Lloyd Webber, Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: (The Crack Being Treated Seriously Is Love Never Dies), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Bickering, Crack Treated Seriously, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Family Bonding, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Kidfic, M/M, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:35:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25772959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malicegeres/pseuds/malicegeres
Summary: Two men and a 10-year-old plot device are left to fend for themselves in the wake of the events of Love Never Dies. Together, Erik and Raoul must learn to care for themselves and each other in order to be there for a son they now find themselves sharing.
Relationships: Raoul de Chagny/Erik | Phantom of the Opera
Comments: 21
Kudos: 47





	let me lead you from your solitude

**Author's Note:**

> So this fic is a challenge to myself to make sense of Love Never Dies, which I hate and have seen multiple times. If you liked the show… You know, honestly, give this a whirl because I’m trying to meet it where it’s at, but understand going in that I am also fully making fun of it (and Phantom of the Opera in general.) This is a labor of strange, semi-ironic love and nostalgia brought on by showing LND to a good friend.
> 
> I also want to get a bit of a disclaimer out of the way as far as the tone and characterization of this fic. Basically, Raoul and Erik both suck, canonically speaking. They’re also going to suck in this fic, because character growth is fun, but they’re going to suck less/differently than in canon because I don’t want to write a domestic comedy about a child being raised by a couple of abusers or whatever. So, like, it's gonna be OOC, but it's gonna be OOC on purpose in ways that are purposeful and internally consistent within my text because God dammit I intend to have fun writing this.
> 
> This would probably be best as a long oneshot as far as pacing, but 2020 has been hell on my motivation and if I post an unfinished fic that puts external pressure on me to actually finish it so multichap it is!

When Christine died, Raoul did not rise to the occasion the way Gustave needed. He had sobered up as much as he could after the bet, tried to put his best face forward so that he might bring his wife and child home to France with him, but in the end she’d chosen _him_. And now, after all that, they’d both lost her forever. So, when he heard the gunshot and the chilling, familiar screams from the dock, he was two drinks in. It wasn’t enough. As he knelt by his wife’s side, Gustave shell-shocked next to him, it was all he could do not to rush back to that bar and the warm, fuzzy oblivion of drink.

Even as sober as so much of it was, the night she died was a blur. The Girys had disappeared into the shadows of the fairground, leaving the three of them alone. Raoul could remember snatches. He remembered Gustave bouncing between the two of them, confused. All he wanted was his mother, but his only options were the distant man he’d always called father and the stranger who clung to his slim little shoulders like a drowning man clinging to a lifesaver.

He remembered cutting in just as his old rival was about to give Meg’s name to police.

“It was a robbery,” he said, meeting the Phantom’s eyes. “He disappeared into the crowd.”

Behind the mask, he could see his eyes begin to burn with fury as they had ten long years ago in that horrible place beneath the Opéra Populaire. Raoul suppressed a shudder, remembering the tight, scratchy sensation of the lasso around his neck, the terror and sorrow and betrayal etched on Christine’s face, but he held his gaze firm.

“Yes,” the Phantom hissed. “A pity. I would very much like the perpetrator to be brought to justice.”

He couldn’t remember what the police said after that, or how they convinced them not to pursue the killer. All he could recall was, after they’d left, the way he gripped the Phantom’s arm and whispered, “Please, Christine would never forgive herself if you killed Meg on her behalf. Meg has to live with this. That’s punishment enough on its own. Please.”

They went back to the hotel room. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there, where Gustave was, or whether the Phantom was with them that night, but he remembered locking himself in the room he’d shared with Christine the night before. The bed still smelled of her perfume, and that was when he lost the rest of the night to drink.

Raoul was no stranger to grief. It was the summer after his parents died, when he and his two older sisters were staying with their aunt in Toulouse, that he rescued Christine’s red scarf from the sea. Restricted as a child of his status often was to family, she and Gustave Daaé were the first people he’d met who weren’t touched by his parents’ death. In his fourteen-year-old vanity he didn’t consider why Christine’s mother wasn’t with them, but when they found each other again at the opera it was their mutual acquaintance with grief that brought them together as more than old playmates.

And just as Christine had music when she was left with no one to look after her, Raoul had his brother Philippe. Suddenly a count at nineteen, Philippe had seen to his sisters’ marriages and his little brother’s upbringing the best he could. But, more than that, he’d doted on them all. What he lacked in maturity, Philippe made up in warmth. He was the life of every party he attended, and he spoiled his siblings to the point where their schoolmasters had their hands full teaching them the first thing about discipline when Raoul and the younger of his sisters first started boarding school.

As much as they’d loved one another, the decade Raoul and Christine spent together was never easy. They were both haunted by their pasts, by unspoken secrets and suspicions, by ghosts both real and imagined. But they always found a way to make it work until Philippe died.

In the morning, he awoke to a pounding at the door that left him wincing from the ache in his head. His stomach roiled as he sat up, calling, “What is it?”

“May I come in, Father?” a small voice replied.

His heart dropped. Between the shock and the drink, he hadn’t noticed whether Gustave was with him when he returned to his rooms. Relief flooded over him, and then guilt. He’d left Gustave at Phantasma assuming he’d lost the boy to the Phantom, too. He certainly deserved to lose him. He knew he’d hurt him, ignoring him and leaving Christine to pick up the pieces after his uncle died, but he couldn’t stop himself from sliding further down the spiral he was on and he told himself it was better to ignore his son than to risk something terrible coming out of his mouth.

“I told you, Gustave, the pathetic louse won’t see you!” another voice shouted across the rooms. “Look, I’m sorry, I thought you wanted to know about decomposition!”

“Good God,” Raoul muttered to himself. He pushed past his nausea, threw on a dressing gown, and threw open the doors. “What on earth have you been telling him?”

The Phantom glared at him, although it was dampened by a surprising hint of embarrassment he was clearly trying to hide. “He asked what would happen to his mother after we bury her. I was simply answering his question honestly.”

Raoul didn’t know how he’d gotten into his rooms. He didn’t know whether Gustave had spent the night with his newfound father, or whether he’d been in his room surrounded by comforting and familiar things. It dawned on him that this was something he should have noticed, that he’d been looking after the boy for ten years and that the Phantom of the blasted Opera had no business taking on that responsibility, and he pulled him quickly to his side.

“It’s alright, son—Gustave,” he corrected himself. He shut his eyes for a moment, waiting for the sting of his mistake to subside. “Mister Y can have the maid fetch me some water, and I’ll tell you what your grandfather used to tell your mother and I about Heaven.”

It had been after ten o’clock in the morning when Raoul was woken up. After Gustave had calmed down, Raoul summoned the maid again so that he could take breakfast in his room. Gustave stayed with him, silently rolling a half-eaten sausage across his plate and never quite meeting his eyes. Outside, he could hear _him_ beginning to pace. By eleven, Raoul was beginning to realize the logistical pickle he was in. The liquor cabinet was in the parlor. So was the man who had just cost him his wife and traumatized the boy who’d come to him for comfort. And the longer he was kept from the liquor cabinet, the longer he had to stew in the fact that it was something he needed enough that he was willing to risk a confrontation that might upset the child he still thought of as his son to get to it.

But he did need it, so he got up and went to the door. His hope was that he could simply walk out, grab a bottle and glass, and get back to his room without trouble if he just avoided eye contact with his unwelcome guest. He opened it slowly, as though he’d escape his notice so long as he didn’t make a sound.

Naturally, the Phantom’s head whipped around the second it was in view. “Monsieur,” he said stiffly.

Determined to make his plan work, Raoul brushed wordlessly past him toward the liquor cabinet. There was a fifth of fine American bourbon waiting for him, and he would not allow this man to keep him from it.

But then, in a small voice too similar to Gustave’s to ignore, the Phantom asked, “Is he alright?”

Raoul stopped, letting out a heavy sigh. “His mother is dead. What do you think?” He took another step forward, but stopped as the Phantom spoke again.

“Is he ready to leave?”

He turned around, swallowing the burst of rage that had just bubbled up. “For where, may I ask?”

“He is my son,” said the Phantom, drawing himself up as he asserted himself. “He is coming home with me.”

“His mother is _dead_ ,” Raoul repeated. “You can’t just take him and make him start over in a new country.”

“Well, I can’t very well go to France. I’m a wanted man, dead or not.”

“Perhaps you should have thought about that before you murdered people,” he muttered.

“ _He is my son_. What happens to him is no longer any concern of yours.”

Raoul stood there a moment, glowering, his feet frozen to the floor. Then he turned around, threw open the cabinet, grabbed a bottle and tumbler, and stormed back across the room. “Well, _my wife_ is being buried in France, so I leave it to you to explain to your son why he won’t be attending his mother’s funeral.”

A pale hand gripped Raoul’s shoulder, the pressure of its long, bony fingers sending a chill down his spine. “You will not take Christine from me, you miserable drunk,” he hissed.

Biting his lip to steel his nerves, Raoul pinched the wrist attached to that hand with his fingers and lifted it gingerly from his shoulder. “Christine wanted to be buried with her father,” he said, his voice steady. “But, then, you did see fit to use his grave as a battleground. Perhaps it was too generous to assume you’d understand her wishes.”

The Phantom rounded on him. “I understood that her _final_ wish was for the boy to remain with me.”

“Got that in writing, have you? The law believes you dead, and it believes me to be Gustave’s real father. I’ve raised the boy for ten years while you’ve been here putting on your little circus act. If you’re this callous about his mother I can’t imagine the father you’ll turn out to be. Perhaps I ought to keep him after all, to save him from spending the rest of his childhood with you.”

Again a pale hand shot out and gripped Raoul, this time around his neck.

Now, ten years was a long time, and both men had made a number of significant changes to their lives. Piangi was the last person to meet his fate at the hands of the Phantom’s lasso, and his hands had been used for little more than writing music and signing checks since. Soft, gentle Raoul, on the other hand, had taken to hanging around bars and gambling halls that rather quickly taught him how to fight. He was hungover, however, and still not the strongest of men, so the result was that both men were quite evenly matched in how bad they were at fighting.

So Raoul dropped the bottle and glass and wrested the Phantom’s hand from his neck before twisting him into a chokehold. The Phantom’s mask caught against Raoul’s ribcage and was pushed askew. The Phantom responded by stomping his booted foot onto the inner arch of Raoul’s slipper, causing the Vicomte to yelp in pain. He was just preparing to bend the Phantom over and jab him in the stomach with his knee when the door burst open.

“Stop it! Stop it, both of you!” Gustave shouted.

The two men’s heads shot up as they froze. Slowly, Raoul released the Phantom from his headlock. He stood upright and straightened his mask.

The Phantom cleared his throat. “Gustave, my son, I—“

“No! Stop ‘sonning’ me! I know Mother said you’re my real father, but I already have a father! You don’t get to come in here and get into fights with him, you don’t get to keep my mother away from my grandfather, and you don’t get to make me stay in America without asking!”

Raoul stepped forward. “Gustave… Are you saying—?”

“Shut up!” he snapped, balling his little fists. “Just shut up! You don’t get to leave me alone, alright? When Uncle Philippe died, you left me and Mother alone. You stopped playing with me and you stopped listening to her sing, and now you’re just _angry_ all the time! Now she’s gone and here you are _fighting_. I don’t have a third father out there somewhere, alright? All I’ve got now is you two. You don’t get to fight, and you don’t get to make me leave Mother just because you don’t like each other.”

Gustave had Christine’s large, brown eyes, and as he looked into them Raoul was pulled back to the Opéra Populaire—not down below, as he so often was when his mind transported him, but to a rehearsal room he’d hardly thought of in years. _If you don’t stop, I’ll go mad!_ Christine had shouted, tears beginning to pool in those same brown eyes. He’d ignored her wishes a thousandtimes since, and it had been a long time since Christine had trusted him enough to listen when she shouted like that. In their final years together she was subdued, saying whatever might calm Raoul down and shield Gustave from realizing the man his father had become.

The Phantom blinked. “But I’m—“

“ _Shut up!_ ” he repeated. “I don’t care what you are, you’re both grownups! I’m ten years old, in case you’ve forgotten! I shouldn’t be the one telling people to get along!” Then, in a move that made Raoul wonder how he hadn’t guessed his paternity sooner, he swept his dressing gown gracefully closed and slammed the door behind him.

He left them as frozen as they’d been when he came out, their jaws hanging slack as they digested the dressing down they’d just received from a ten-year-old boy.

“Do you often allow him to talk to you that way?” the Phantom asked, looking dazed behind his mask.

“I’ve never had occasion to permit or forbid it,” Raoul replied stiffly. He shook his head, clearing it. “Come here,” he said, gesturing to the Phantom as he began to walk to the rented study. “Gustave wants to return to France. We need to discuss the matter of your repatriation.”

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me at [crowleyraejepsen](http://crowleyraejepsen.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr!


End file.
